Swimming Lessons(37)

“I can go later.”

“And what about me?” Louise said.

“You can still go. They say you meet more people if you travel alone. You can send me postcards—let me know what I’m missing.” I tried to laugh, but it came out strangled.

“You’ve changed. It’s those baby hormones making you stupid. Bloody hell, Ingrid, just get rid of it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. That man’s the one who should be ashamed.”

“I’m not ashamed. I’m excited.” I didn’t sound it, even to myself.

“You have no idea what it’ll be like, do you?” She sat beside me and took my hand, trying another tack. “You’re too young, Ingrid. Think what your aunt would say. Have you told her?”

“Not yet.” I withdrew my hand from hers.

She looked me up and down. “You’re not showing—well, the boobs maybe a bit. How far gone are you?” Her hand was on my knee. “We could go to the clinic together.”

“I’m keeping it. This is what I’ve chosen, with Gil.”

“What that man has chosen.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Think about what you’re giving up,” she said.

“What do you mean? I won’t be giving anything up. I’m going to finish university.” It hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t. I’d avoided thoughts about the birth or what life would be like afterwards. I’d been to the GP in Hadleigh, and then to an appointment at a London hospital where I was weighed and measured and examined by a doctor who didn’t bother to tell me his name. He’d given me a date when the baby was due, but it seemed so far in the future—like thinking about Christmas in April—that I couldn’t imagine it ever coming round. I’d been given leaflets on antenatal classes and weaning, but the sketchy drawings of grown-ups holding babies and smiling seemed to have nothing to do with me and I’d thrown them away.

“When’s it due? April, May next year? Term won’t have finished and you’ll be enormous. Think what people will say.”

“When did you ever care what people said?”

“What will you live on?”

“Gil has something in trust from his mother and some money from his novels . . .”

“So you’re going to live on the money given to you by a man?”

“. . . and there’s his teaching.”

“His teaching!” She spat out the words. “He won’t be in that job for long when they find out.”

“They won’t be bothered. They’ve seen it all before.” I pulled away from her and stood up.

“It’s an abuse of power,” she said. “You’re his student. It’s disgusting.”

“I love him,” I said again, angrily this time.

“And you think he loves you? You think he hasn’t done this before?”

“We’re getting married. I know he wants this—a family.”

I sat again and we were both silent for several minutes. After a while I said, “I think I can smell the beans burning.”


I wore the yellow crocheted dress to our wedding. Louise, however, arrived at Caxton Hall registry office on the 5th of October 1976 in a long white dress, high-necked, with lace sleeves. “Secondhand,” she said. “What do you think?” She twirled on the pavement. She wore it to annoy you and had no idea how much it hurt me.

Inside, waiting in the lobby, Jonathan tried to defuse the atmosphere. “Diana Dors and Orson Welles got married here,” he said. You and Louise looked in opposite directions and I sat on the only chair. “Not to each other, of course.”

“Actually,” Louise said to no one in particular, “this is where the suffragettes held their first meetings.”

The registrar appeared, picking food out of her teeth and wiping her hand across her mouth. And it was you and Louise, in her mock wedding dress, that the woman greeted and ushered forwards to be married.


In the end, of course, Louise was right: the university did find out and they did care. I never discovered who told them—perhaps it was Mrs. Carter, who’d seen that first kiss; perhaps it was Louise, so angry with me for deserting her that she didn’t think about the consequences. Whoever it was, on the 29th of April 1977, when the baby was nearly due, you received an invitation for a chat with the dean the next day.

“It’ll be fine,” you said. “A slap on the wrist. ‘Just don’t do it again, Coleman,’ with a nudge and a wink. Really, nothing to worry about.”

Neither of us wore our wedding rings on campus, and when I attended your classes we carried on as if we were still only lecturer and student. At the beginning of the autumn term, when I still wasn’t showing, Guy had invited me to his lodgings for a “bedroom shuffle” (as he called it), and I delighted in telling him that I was seeing someone else and watching his face fall.

“Who is it?” he asked, and when I wouldn’t tell he pressed me further. “It’s someone I know, isn’t it? He’s married, isn’t he?”

I knew there was gossip. Sometimes rumours went round like Chinese whispers: you were having an affair with the vice chancellor’s wife or his secretary; you were a homosexual; you’d been discovered with your pants down in your office. Up until Christmas the latter was nearly true; we just hadn’t been caught. The number of private tutorials I had that first term grew until I was being requested by you almost daily, but we never discussed my work. Instead, you asked me again and again to tell you what I wanted you to do, until I had to come up with something.